Guillotine

An interesting tidbit I picked up from Slashdot this evening. As I was wandering through my newsreader wondering why there hasn’t been anything really interesting to write about lately, and I find this… It seems that Yahoo has officially announced that it will shut down the Geocities service for good.

Reading feedback on this I kinda get the idea nobody really knows what Geocities actually “was”. I mean really… Comparing it to Myspace or Facebook??? Before Yahoo got a hold of it Geocities was simply a web host just like any other… Just like the one I pay to host this site… Except it was free. Comparing it to a profile site like Facebook or Myspace is just not even close. Those sites are strictly there for profiles and networking with barely any content to speak of. Geocities on the other hand was free form web design… Granted most folks didn’t really have the knowledge or skill to create sites that were much better than a typical Myspace page (I never could convince people that 100 animated gifs wasn’t a good idea), but there were some who utilized the service to it’s full capability… I’m sure countless geeks out there probably learned to code HTML and their first clumsy flirting with javascript right there in Geocities file editor… I know I was one… I spent countless days on end pouring out HTML like a madman with nothing keeping me going besides  lukewarm soda, cigarettes, and the anticipation of seeing the next page go live. I think at one point I had at least 5 different sites running on there plus one on Tripod, and another on my Earthlink web space. Trying desperately to make a page that would interest enough people to make that free hit counter at the bottom roll to 100,000.

Yes… It’s the sad life of a nerd I know, but the day I booted up my 386SX 16Mhz computer and waited for my clunky 56k modem to connect and see that one of my sites had hit 100,002 was still an amazing moment.

I also recall the old neighborhood community system they used… Say what you like, but I think it was unique even by today’s standards. I still remember my personal site (which is still online to this day) was located in SouthBeach/Shores/.  Most people these days don’t even bother with coding their own HTML, and I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who don’t even know what that is anymore even though it’s still the way pages are created. Personally I still like to code my own with the exception of this blog obviously. Something about it get’s lost when you rely on software to do everything for you… Yeah the site is a bit prettier than the ones I wrote, and it’s rather easy to update, but with my old sites I knew every detail. I knew why every item was in a particular place, and understood how it all worked. Now I have to search help sites, or download applications or plug-ins to get things done as I’m completely clueless to the background scripting used by these modern blog sites. And it’s not all roses in that garden either. Now I have to deal with the twitchiness that comes with using someone Else’s software to run my site. I’ve already spent countless hours trying to fix problems when the software just decides it doesn’t want to work today. You never really had that problem with hand coding… You always tested your code before going live, and barring any server issues once you had it right it stayed that way.

Well… Enough reminicing… I suppose I had better get my butt over to Yahoo, and back my pages and files up before they vanish… Hate to lose that site as it was the first I ever made. It’s been through so many changes that reflect my learning efforts in web design, and it still has some information that doesn’t quite fit with any of my other sites, but I don’t want to lose.

Here is the link to the original Slashdot article:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/23/2339224&from=rss

Update: October 24th, 2006. I wrote an update to this article here: Yahoo Geocities Update